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THIRD year lecture modules and descriptions
cursai

This page refers only to the lecture modules available. Students should already have chosen their seminar topic.

Semester 1
Semester 2
Timetables are available in the Department

Students are reminded that they must take four lecture modules during the year. One should be taken in the same semester as the seminar course, the other three should be taken in the other semester.

SEMESTER ONE

The Northern Ireland Problem

Course	Semester	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI328	1	Dr Mary Harris	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This course investigates the nature and causes of conflict in Northern Ireland, and the various attempts to resolve it. It examines the following issues:

The emergence of Ulster Unionism in the 1880s and campaigns against Home Rule
Tensions and conflicts in the Northern Ireland state from 1921 to the civil rights marches in 1968
The escalation of conflict from 1968 until the suspension of parliament in 1972
Recurring conflict and attempts to resolve it from 1972 up to the Belfast Agreement of 1998

The main groups under consideration are Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and the British and Irish governments. The course will examine questions such as the following:

What were the concerns, expectations, objectives and aspirations of these groups?
How united were they?
How did they interpret conflict?
What options were open to them?
What strategies did they use to further their objectives? Why?
Why did they attract support?
How did their critics perceive them?

Students will be encouraged to examine critically a range of interpretations published by academics, observers and participants in the conflict.

The final lectures of the course will consider questions of continuity and change in the positions of these groups during the twentieth century.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term essay & final examination

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI337	1	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course title: Nazi Germany

Lecturer: Dr Riccarda Torriani

Course description: This course deals with the origins, course, and aftermath of Nazi Germany. It is divided into three sections: the first deals with the origins of Nazism and Nazi government until the outbreak of war in 1939; the second section looks at different groups within society, to see how they responded to Nazism; the last section deals with the war and the Holocaust, as well as efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past in the post-war period. The course will pay special attention to questions that have caused controversy among historians - such as whether Nazism represented a continuity or discontinuity in German history, the role of ordinary Germans in implementing the regime's racial policies, and the implications of the recent emphasis on their own wartime suffering.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI365	1	2 tutorials	5

Course title: Native North Americans: From Prehistory To The Present

Lecturer: Dr Enrico Dal Lago

Course description: This course is designed as general introduction to the history of Native Peoples in the North American continent, with particular emphasis on the last 300 years. Its main focus revolves around the transformations brought upon Native American culture and society by the encounter with European civilization. Exploring topics such as Conquest and Colonization, Native Americans and European Empires, Indian Removal, the Making of the Western Frontier, the Plains Wars, and the New Native American Consciousness, the course will enable students to pursue their own interests in the history and culture of particular Native American populations. Anthropological concepts will play a key part in explaining the process of change undergone by different tribes in different places. Students will be encouraged to develop a theoretical framework that will enable them to approach the study of indigenous peoples in a multidisciplinary fashion.

Popular Culture in Pre-Industrial Europe

Course	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI376	Dr. Niall O Ciosain	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Catholic Identity

Course description:

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Catholic Identity in Early Modern Europe

Course	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI407	Dr. Alison Forristal	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: To what extent did Catholics create a new identity after the Protestant Reformation? This course assesses the ways in which Catholics constructed their social identity in a period of deep crisis and adjustment. Through an exploration of a rich variety of sources (c.1500-1700), the course allows students to study the response of Catholics to the unprecedented challenges of the Protestant Reformation. It also investigates the organic movements of invigoration and discipline that shaped the Catholic church institutionally and influenced the behaviour of Catholics in society throughout the early modern period.

The module examines the traditional tools of institutional authority that Catholics used to redefine the role of the Catholic church in early modern society: conciliar action in the Council of Trent (1545-63), papal government and clerical leadership in parishes and dioceses. A further section analyses the innovative principles and practices in education and missionary expansion (in Protestant regions and the 'New World') pursued by leading Catholic 'Reformers' such as the Jesuits. The module also analyses the impact of collective acts of popular religion, such as the cult of saints and penitential processions, and assesses the power of gender stereotypes, group associations and confraternities to develop and reinforce distinct Catholic values and behaviour. This course enables students to understand the bond between religious beliefs and actions and the ability of religious confession to define the social identity of individuals and groups.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HIxxx	1	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course title: Intellectual Culture in Ireland

Lecturer: Dr. Enda Leaney

Course description: This course will examine the role of intellectuals in the social, cultural, and political history of Ireland from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It will examine the unique role played by scientists, doctors, antiquarians, educationalists, and historians in creating a distinctive Irish culture. Topics to be discussed include the clash between science and religion in Victorian Ireland, the role of education in breaking the Ascendancy hegemony of the professions, the Celtic Revival, Young Ireland and cultural nationalism, exhibition culture in Ireland, and the controversial history of the National Museum of Ireland. The course will provide an unusual yet accessible perspective on Irish history.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI423	1	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course title: Building the Empire: The Irish Colonial Experience

Lecturer: Dr. Barry Crosbie

Course description: This lecture module broadly examines Irish emigration and settlement within the context of the ’Second British Empire’. As such it is primarily concerned with Irish participation and ’collaboration’ in British overseas expansion in North America, Australasia, Southern and East Africa, South and South East Asia. Despite resistance among some scholars in the past to assimilate the historical reality of Irish Empire-Building, the Irish did, in fact, proactively engage in British colonial enterprise overseas where they arguably replicated the process of colonisation which had first occurred in Ireland under the Tudor monarchs in 16th century.
Significantly, much of the recent scholarship on Irish participation and collaboration within the Second British Empire over the past 10 years has presented a new perspective on the Irish colonial experience overseas. While such studies have generally agreed that Ireland’s greatest contribution to the building of the Second British Empire was through the massive number of everyday white settlers that it provided, this course will examine not only Irish migration and settlement within the empire but will also try to assess more nuanced interpretations of Irish men and women’s contribution to British imperialism.
With both of these issues very much in view, this lecture series will survey the major episodes of Irish migration and settlement to various parts of the British Empire roughly between 1700 and 1914. It will compare and contrast Irish colonial migrants in this period with those who emigrated to the US and Britain thus providing a basis for an overall assessment on Irish emigration and settlement within the context of the wider British Empire.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI425	1	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course title: Church, State & Society in Europe, 1870-1970

Lecturer: Dr. Gearóid Barry

Course description: This new course aims to enable students to view a relatively familiar historical period (the late nineteenth- and the twentieth- centuries) through a new prism, often overlooked in mainstream historiography. The history of organised religion generally (and Catholicism in particular) challenges many common assumptions about the reputedly inexorable secularisation of the continent from the end of the eighteenth-century onwards.

Clearly, the revolutionary turmoil after 1789 marked a breach with the era of Christianity’s domination of Europe when the institutions of state rested on the relationship with the church. The nineteenth-century was marked by other reversals for religion in the face of contemporary ideas of political and scientific ’progress.’ By 1870, the institutional church’s prestige had suffered with the loss of the Papal States. The contemporaneous First Vatican Council, under Pope Pius IX, seemed only to deepen further the divide between the church and modern thought and the new (and often hostile) secular nation-states that were consolidating themselves at that time.

The course focuses, however, on the relative resilience of religion in the new European order under different guises. Though ceding some ground, Catholicism, in its turn, was shaped by the innovations of the age – e.g. railways, the popular press- and managed to adapt and adopt them as vehicles of its own particular religious message. The most spectacular example of this was the advent of mass pilgrimage at Lourdes, for instance. Interesting use is made not alone of written primary sources but also of iconography and satirical cartoons.
The papacy, as a religious and political institution, forms a crucial reference point in this course, not least given the exalted role given to it by ultramontanism, the dominant ecclesiology of the period. Comparative perspectives from German Lutheran and other Protestant churches shall provide additional context for the above.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

SEMESTER 2

Course	Lecturer	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HIxxx		2	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Method of assessment and evaluation: There will be a mid term written assignment (25%) and a final exam (75%).

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the start of the course.

Early Irish Law

Course	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI327	Professor Daibhi O Croinin	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This course offers a survey of Early Irish or 'Brehon' law, i.e. the legal system in operation in Ireland from the earliest date down to the 16th century. The lectures/seminars examine the distinctive features of that law (comared with the English Common Law and with contemporary continental legal systems) and involve the study of a representative sample of individual law texts (in translation) both in an Irish context and from a comparative European perspective.

Students are expected to work in small groups while preparing brief classroom presentations on the subject of individual law texts or specific aspects of Early Irish Law.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term essay & final examination

Women in Medieval Society

Course	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI345	Dr. Kimberly LoPrete	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This course examines the lived experiences and contributions of women in medieval society, politics, and the religious life, c.500-1500, through lecture and the discussion of primary sources. While acknowledging the prevailing misogyny of the period, emphasis is nonetheless placed on the complex and changing figurings of gender as well as on the diversity of women's activities within their multiple social roles. Women whose broader contributions are examined in some detail include Dhuoda, Hrosvita of Gandershim, Adela of Blois, Hildegard of Bingen, and Joan of Arc.

Method of assessment and evaluation: mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts:A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course

War, Religion and Society in France, 1572-1625

Course

Lecturer

Contact hours/weekly

ECTS

HI350.2

Dr. Alison Forristal

2 fortnightly tutorials

Course description: This module analyses the terrible violence of the Wars of Religion, when new ideologies of religious hatred and opposition shattered local communities and destabilised French society. It explores how the new doctrines of resistance and toleration promoted by the warring Catholic and Protestant parties profoundly affected the development of political thought and religious, social and political order in France. The module then systematically examines the ways in which, following the Edict of Nantes (1598), both Catholics and Protestants sought to recover politically and socially from the dislocation of the crisis of the Wars. It concludes with a systematic survey of the triumph of the alliance between the Catholic church and the Bourbon monarchy to 1625.

Method of assessment and evaluation: mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts:A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course

Tudor Conquest of Ireland

Course	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI358	Professor Steven Ellis	2 tutorials	5

Course description: This lecture course assesses the various policies pursued by the Tudor monarchs to extend English rule throughout Ireland. The changing role of Ireland within the English state and the growing importance of Ireland in Tudor policy are also discussed, as also the gradual development and particular manifestations of Irish resistance to Tudor reform. By the 1580s, Tudor attempts to 'civilize' Ireland by shiring the coutnry, plantation, cultural imperialism and religious reform were sparking off strenuous political and religious opposition both among Gaelic Irish and Old English, leading in turn to the creation of novel forms of Irish nationalist sentiment. Eventually, what Henry VIII had hoped to achieve 'by sober ways, politic drifts and amiable persuasions' had to be accomplished by military conquest which almost bankrupted the crown. This course assesses why things went so badly wrong.

Method of assessment and evaluation: mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts:Ellis, S.G., Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (London, 1998)
Lennon, C. Sixteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1994) -->

Course	Semester	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI371	2	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course title: Economy & Society in Central-Eastern Europe, 1790-1945

Lecturer: Dr. Csaba Lévai

Course description: This module is a survey of the social and economic history of Central-Eastern Europe (the territories of the historical kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary) from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the end of World War II. It aims to acquaint students with the definitions of Central Eastern Europe and the relations of the historical development of it to the history of “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe”. Topics that will be explored include the differences and the similarities in the “industrial revolutions” of the different parts of Central-Eastern Europe, and the special social history of the different territories in the 19th century. A special emphasis will be laid on the economic and social consequences of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the peace treaties after World War I in the region. In respect of the interwar period it addresses the problem why the successor states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Yugoslavia) of the pre World War I empires (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Russia, Germany) were not able to create real economic co-operation in the region, and what kind of role the unsolved social and economic problems of Central-Eastern Europe played in the outbreak of World War II. The module also discusses very briefly the social and economic history of the Balkans, but only as a reference point to the development of Central-Eastern Europe.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment final examination.

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course.

Labour, Society & Politics in Ireland, 1800-1960

Course	Semester	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI417	2	Dr. John Cunningham	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This module surveys Irish labour history. It examines the character of rural and urban social protest movements representing the working poor, the development of trade unionism throughout the island and Ireland, the impact of radical ideologies. The competition from nationalist and unionist politics, and the reasons for the stunted political development of Irish labour.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment formal examination

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course

Ireland & the War of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660

Course	Semester	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI418	2	Dr. Ciarán Ó Murchadha	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This lecture module examines the tumultuous period in Irish history between the late 1630s and the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660. Among the topics that are explored in detail are the origins and course of the rebellion of 1641, the proceedings of the Confederation of Kilkenny, and the piecemeal military conflicts that occupied much of the rest of the decade. The campaign of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (1649-1650) is also examined, as well as the period of Commonwealth rule that followed to 1660. It is a central feature of the module that all these events and episodes are viewed against the wider background of events affecting all three Stuart kingdoms, and considerable attention is therefore devoted to developments in Scotland and England also. Although military affairs feature prominently in the module as a whole, equal weight is given to the social, economic and religious contexts in which they occurred.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment formal examination

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course

The Rise & Fall of the British Raj

Course	Semester	Lecturer	Contact hours/weekly	ECTS
HI422	2	Dr. Barry Crosbie	2 fortnightly tutorials	5

Course description: This module introduces the main themes of the history of British India since the decline of the Mughal Empire in the late eighteenth century to the events that led up to the end of British rule in India in 1947. It considers the nature of the regional states which emerged after the decline of Mughal hegemony and considers the role of indigenous and foreign interlocutors in creating and undermining them. The events of the British colonial conquest of India and the rise of Indian nationalism from the mid-nineteenth century will provide the central frame of reference for this lecture module. Topics will include: pre-colonial Indian society (the Sultanate and Mughal periods); the transition to colonialism in India; the East India Company Raj (c. 1772-1850); the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8; birth of the modern state and indigenous peoples (c. 1848-1850); civil society and the Indian economy; crisis of the colonial order: the emergence of early Indian and Irish nationalisms; Gandhian-led mass movements of the 1920s, 30s and 40s; independence and partition.

Method of assessment and evaluation: Mid-term written assignment formal examination

Core texts: A reading list will be provided at the outset of the course

History
National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland.
Phone: +353 (0)91 492537, Fax: +353 (0)91 494556, E-mail: history

nuigalway.ie
This page was last updated Saturday, December 01, 2007

THIRD year lecture modules and descriptions cursai

SEMESTER ONE

SEMESTER 2

THIRD year lecture modules and descriptions
cursai